The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy defines realism as: "Generic Realism:a, b, and c and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as F-ness, G-ness, and H-ness is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on." By scientific realism I mean … Continue reading A new(?) argument for scientific realism: the ethical value of certain theoretical entities

I saw this on the old Twitter : And was, of course, instantly infuriated. Any sentence that begins "philosophers believe" is almost certainly thereby wrong. But it got me to thinking about envy again. In particular about the fact that envy is not especially useful as a morally diagnostic term- as a concept to employ … Continue reading The dilemma in using envy to diagnose evil

Going into the election I thought there was about a 10% chance that Trump would make a serious extra-legal coup attempt if he lost- a view I maintained both against people who thought it was way too high, and against people who thought it was way too low. One thing that weighed heavily on my … Continue reading It may be that the reason there was no coup is those damn millennials

One of the things I enjoy doing- and a must for people with a creative streak who like singing but can't compose music- is rewriting the lyrics of songs while keeping the same basic rhythmic structure. This allows us to sing with different words to the same tune and instrumental track- great for Karaoke. Here's … Continue reading Song rewrites

Early I reported on a sudden jump in two important Natural Language Processing benchmarks- The ARC-Easy and the OpenBookQA. A new methodology apparently reduced by two thirds errors in the first, and made no errors whatsoever in the second- giving it solidly superhuman performance. These achievements would be, to say the least, extremely impressive. However, … Continue reading UPDATE: performance jump in two very interesting natural language benchmarks (it’s gone away)

Richard Seymour on the "dammed if you do, dammed if you don't" nature of responding to accusations, re: Corbyn & """anti-Semitism""". @Andraydomise on the inanity of attempts to redefine slavery so as to exclude everything that isn't chattel slavery: "At some point we really are going to have to develop better language and frameworks around … Continue reading Some good takes from Twitter: A collection

NOTE: This story is now subject to an update which likely invalidates its central premise: https://deponysum.com/2020/11/22/update-performance-jump-in-two-very-interesting-natural-language-benchmarks-its-gone-away/ "BERT Ensemble - MBGA Optimization" is a new entrant to two leader-boards natural language understanding tasks on the the Allen AI Leader-boards. Without trying to sound clickbaity, I audibly gasped when I read its results. It scored 97.6% on … Continue reading Massive performance jump in two very interesting natural language benchmarks

It is often observed by conservatives that the existence of a welfare state reduces the incentive to have a job. Of course it may also provide people with a means to pull themselves out of poverty, take greater entrepreneurial risks etc counterbalancing this incentive. It occurred to me though that there's another incentive effect which … Continue reading Brief observation on the political economy of the welfare state

I was reading through the The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics like the nerd that I am when I noticed this passage from Partha Dasgupta describing why economists don't talk about values much: "It is almost as though the protagonists are embarrassed to air their values, because to do so would be to state … Continue reading A theory of a lot of what gets called cringe, owing to Partha Dasgupta